It's cool for cats ...

... to have their own adventure playground. Meet Byron, woodsman and builder of such places. Well now he is. It was a new project for him, but you'd think he'd been doing it for years. We now have a fully customised place for the boys to romp, built entirely from reclaimed and discarded materials. Done in the space of six hours; if you have an eye for construction, a chain saw and are young and fit it is amazing what you can do. The cats seem to like it and are at ease with it (see extras), but of course we'll see them get the full benefit come the spring.

Been a good day; bit of a lie in, dejunked the garden whilst our fabricator of feline jungle gyms did his stuff, had curry for breakfast and a mince pie for afternoon tea. 

Tonight we went to Ang, a restaurant just off the Tottenham Court Road, to meet friends for (again) a curry. This was a brilliant experience. It is unremarkable from the outside and even less so on the inside. We walked in and all we could see was a brightly lit sub-standard greasy spoon decor with three students waiting for a takeaway. Our friends were sitting in a corner. Other than that the restaurant was empty. We decide to move to another table rather than be by the swing kitchen door and the crapped out CD player (which got stuck). This positioned us under a photograph of the proprietor (as was) in the mid 1960s who was posing outside the premises with Mohamed Ali. There was a curious stain on the wall of this picture like someone caught in the blast  of a nuclear explosion (turned out to be another family member removed  by bad photoshopping). One of our friends made the mistake of asking whether the waiter whether he was in another picture and got a very terse reply to the effect that he was old but not that old. All very good natured. Other pictures showed stars of the 60s - I remember seeing Roy Orbison but can't remember the others, I was drinking Cobra big time. 

The staff were actually lovely, the food amazingly ordinary without being bad (our vegetable biriyani had tinned carrots in but was curiously ok) and the service hilarious. We asked for chocolates with the bill, jokingly, and they chucked half a box of After Eight at us by way of an encore and even offered to pop out to the corner shop to get some more if we wanted. We shared them 'round the restaurant rather than hog them. Other customers wandered in and there was a shared bonhomie under the failed lighting (which still had Christmas decorations dangling from it). You had to be there. Worth the price just for the experience ... definitely a local rather than a metro establishment. Give it a go, you'll love it for all the wrong reasons.

Had a pint in The Grafton Arms then took the tube back to Waterloo (we walked the 2+ miles coming up but it was quite cold by eleven pm so didn't want to walk back). Coming home was one of the worst late train out of London experiences I have ever had. Sardines and falling asleep standing up... But otherwise a great night.